Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Different election years call for different strategeries

I was one of many who were surprised in 2004 when there were no new terrorist attacks and no new Bush wars started, given the bump in the polls and the 2002 elections aWol got from 9/11 and the Iraq war. Perhaps the March 11, 2004 bombings in Spain suggested to Rove & Co. that another attack or war might finally make them appear incompetent and reckless, rather than resolute and patriotic, to the majority of American voters. But I believe the differences between '02 and '04 have a simpler explanation: One presidential election is easier to steal than 435 Congressional elections, or even 33 Senate elections. Aside from helping John Kerry to make a fool of himself, the Bushies really didn't try very hard to use their policy power to influence the election. They didn't postpone the election, as some feared. They didn't start the brutal assault on Fallujah until after the election. Heck, they didn't even stop pumping oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve even as gas prices were rising.

But this year is more like 2002. Once again, they are ratcheting up the rhetoric for war, terrorist attacks are making a resurgence (in other countries, so far) along with another convenient tape from Osama. And this time they ARE halting the pumping of oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

What this says to me is that they knew they could steal the 2004 presidential election. Way too many states were solidly red, and a few untraceable electronic voting machines in key precincts in Florida and Ohio were all that was needed to finish off Kerry (well, along with Kerry himself). But there aren't enough paperless voting machines throughout the country to guarantee that they'll hold onto their House majority simply through fraud, so they are going back to the 2002 method of using the (literal) bully pulpit to corner the Democrats into being whimpering simps (well, more so), and adding whatever tools are at their disposal to bring gas prices down.

They know that their survival may be at stake if they lose the House this fall, and they'll do anything within their enormous power to see that that doesn't happen--the country and the world be damned.